MOVING TO THE WATERBERG, a mountainous region of the South African Bushveld that had been the last great hunting grounds of the Voortrekkers, had been as stimulating as it was traumatic for the Theron family. Pa took a position as manager of Double M Ranch, raising disease-resistant Bonsmara cattle that had been specially bred by the veterinary boffs at Onderstepoort. The only way to farm cattle there was with cowboys and the occasional cowgirl.
It was a farm, but it wasn’t bucolic Bergsig and it wasn’t theirs. The farm was owned by an absentee landlord, the heir to a battery-chicken empire (Melodie referred to it as Chicken Auschwitz) but it was not a bad life after all. The place was extremely wild compared to the old farm where the biggest menace had been that nothing much ever happened. Here the dangers ranged from jackals and caracals that ravaged the chicken houses, to leopards and mambas that lurked in the veld around them.
At the time the Theron family arrived in the Waterberg, Melodie was a gangly 12-going-on-20. She was not allowed to do any real cowgirl work. Weekends and holidays kept her sane. Her parents had kept it as a surprise, that when they arrived at their new home in the Bushveld mountains, Top Deck was there to meet them. It was a bittersweet reunion for the teenager, who was extremely fond of the Palomino, but whose love was set aside for one horse only and it was not a mare.
Pa helped Melodie set up a paddock arena they called “the jumps” on a piece of ground below the farmstead. She continued riding horses every weekend when she was home from boarding school and every holiday, exploring hill and dale. She took up show jumping and three-day eventing and by the end of that year she had won several junior titles (“eventing” was the preferred form of horse competition in the region, usually a three-day happening featuring dressage, a cross-country course and jumping).
For Melodie, by contrast to life back on the Highveld, her time at Pioneers Agricultural High boarding school was a painful comedown. She found out soon enough that her school mates were mostly misfits who had been rejected by other schools or by their families. Pioneers turned out to be a kind of low-grade reformatory where grades were among the lower priorities; not much incentive for a bright and ambitious teenager. She felt like her parents had cheated her. Which teenager doesn’t!
The boredom at school was acute. Classes were so agonisingly slow she started to daydream on a competitive level, usually about horses. By the end of Standard 8, when she was 15, her marks had dropped from the 80s to the 60s, yet she still came top of the class by an unassailable gap.
While her days at Double M were consumed with riding Top Deck, her nights there, as much as back at boarding school, were a vacant space into which a black stallion would sometimes ride. She would conjure the spirit of Zulu at every possible moment: she was lying in a meadow, could smell the damp soil and see the invertebrate life delving among the grass stalks and flowers; the sun was high and warm and cumulonimbus clouds were tumbling in the sky.
In the hypnogogic state between being awake and asleep she could feel warm puffs of horse breath on her neck and then her night-time adventures would begin. When she awoke in the morning after such a dreamtime she would always be hugging her pillow and her body would be tingling with sensual contentment.
Several of the less than economically viable farms in the Waterberg were converting to private game reserves. You didn’t have to feed or dip wild animals and people paid you to come and see them, sometimes shoot them. Double M took advantage of the tourism boom by offering dude ranch weekends, allowing city folks to bunk over and pretend to muster cattle alongside the real cowboys and cowgirls, complete with bedroll sleep-outs and coffee pots on the campfire.
Whenever she could, Melodie helped the resident horsewoman Wendelle Eaves as a back-up rider. She knew the land better than just about anyone. She and Dell, as her friends called her, became best buds and Wendelle’s Pegasus Safaris used Melodie’s jumps for testing new riders before they were let loose on the horses and the bush.
Many girls go through a “horsey phase” which tends to wane after puberty as boys replace horses in the social milieu. However, some girls find a special relationship with a horse or pony and that first love – like all first loves – lingers. For Melodie at mind-numbing Pioneers her connection to horses was her social everything through the otherwise lonely high school days. Alanis Morisette and Sinead O’Conner played over and over on Walkmans under the covers provided the theme music for those mixed-up teenage nights in the hostel.
Horses are highly attuned to picking up the small nuances of character and mood, not least when there is a chunk of metal in their mouths that the rider controls. As in any close relationship, rider and horse will explore their moods, rhythms, likes and dislikes, fears and joys. The first great joy, after simply being in the saddle astride an astonishing, potent beast, is what many horse riders describe as “flying”.
For a blossoming young woman if that is not love it is certainly the next closest thing. For some people this fusion of minds and bodies might be the best love they ever have. Once past the basics of walking and trotting the real attraction of a horse lies in its brute strength. That kind of power can be habit forming. Call it horsepower. When it goes off it feels like a visceral earth tremor has erupted under you. For those who choose to leap through that ring of fire, the next great adventure is jumping.
One weekend at Double M when Melodie was training for a show-jumping championship, she mistimed the takeoff for a jump. Top Deck hesitated and Melodie executed an ungainly belly-flop landing and got a mouthful of Waterberg sand. While she was dusting off and regaining her breath, along with her dignity, the young woman began remonstrating with her horse.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing Top Deck? How many times have we done that jump!”
Wendelle, sitting on the paddock fence, noted drily: “You know you cannot have love all on your own terms. It doesn’t work like that.”
Melodie turned and glared.
The older woman continued calmly: “If you don’t understand your horse’s point of view your great riding adventure is going to end up in the dust like you just did.”
The teenager stared. It was not the sympathetic support she had expected, although she should have known better, knowing her tutor as she did. Dell was wise to the ways of the world but did not often reveal her empathy with her young protégé. If you wanted to compete seriously you had to be tough, not on your horse but on yourself.
“You have to master the subtle complexities of position if you want to become good at this. You were looking down …”
“Yes, but I was watching …”
“Melodie, no buts!” Wendelle insisted. “You never look down when you approach a jump. You were all tensed up. You are taking up your jumping position too early and you are pulling the reins backwards so she cannot stretch over the jump, which is why she stopped and you did not. You’ve got to loosen up to stop blocking the energy flow. Look ahead to where you are going and your horse will follow. Think about what you are telling Top Deck. If you focus more on her and less on yourself, you’ll suddenly find you’ll be jumping much better.”
By the time Melodie was 17 and in matric, Senya’s presence at home on the farm was ever more fleeting. After finishing school, instead of taking up the sports scholarship he had been offered by Stellenbosch University, he chose to sign up for specialist military training.
In the summer of 1998 there was an outbreak of African horse sickness in the Waterberg which put an end to any horse safaris for the rest of that year. The cause of the outbreak was thought to have been as a result of illegal horse transportation, using faked or illegal AHS vaccination certificates.
Most fingers at the hotel bar in Vaalwater pointed at the farm Wilgenau and the De Klerk family, well-known game poachers and general renegades. But nothing could be proved. Not for the first and not for the last time, the De Klerks of Wilgenau had stuck it to their neighbours and brought economic hardships to the district.
Wendelle had tried to contain the outbreak on Double M Ranch and she was lucky not to lose any horses to the disease, but they all had to be quarantined. She needed to visit Onderstepoort, she told Mr Theron, in order to get the latest vaccines for this specific strain that seemed to be particularly resistant.
It was the end-of-year holiday and Melodie was home, at that moment grooming her eventing horse inside the stables while Wendelle and her father talked outside. When Melodie heard the name her ears tuned in like radar dishes. She dropped the brush and walked outside.
“I heard you talking about Onderstepoort. Isn’t that where they took Zulu, Pa?”
He confirmed it was. Wendelle explained it was where the AHS vaccines were produced.
Melodie went quiet and cold, like a woman on hearing the partner you thought you had lost in a war might actually be alive and being held a prisoner somewhere. She was not sure she wanted to find out the truth but was powerless to prevent the “what ifs” crowding her head.
The following day when Melodie failed to appear at the stables bright and early and ready to ride, Wendelle sensed there was an issue. She found the teenager sitting in the sunshine on the back stoep outside the kitchen, absentmindedly flicking syringa berries with her tongue. It was a spitting game usually played with dried antelope droppings called bokdrolspoegkompetisie (literally, antelope dropping spitting competition).
“Don’t swallow one of those,” said Wendelle as she sidled up and leaned nonchalantly against the kitchen wall, “they’re poisonous.”
“Yup, I’ve heard,” answered the younger woman in a maudlin mood.
“Want to go on a little adventure?” asked Wendelle.
“What little adventure?” asked Melodie, with no real interest in her tone.
“A road trip?”
“Road trip where?”
“To Pretoria.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Onderstepoort is.”
Melodie swung her head around.
“I’ve just discussed it with your dad and he said it would be okay, get your hang-dog face out the house for a while he said.” But the older woman was smiling.
Melodie leapt up and threw her arms around Wendelle’s neck.
“Whoa, hold on there young lady. We have no idea what we’re going to find there, so don’t get up any hopes, okay?”
“I know. But maybe we can find out something, anything.”
Wendelle knew all about the unrequited love affair with the mystery black horse.
She emphasised that finding out about Zulu was not her indaba as she had other serious business to attend to at the institute.
“We’ll be leaving after lunch and sleeping over with a friend of mine. I’ve made an appointment to see the people at the Equestrian Research Centre tomorrow morning.”
Melodie chatted almost all the way from the Waterberg to Pretoria, unable to contain her excitement. It wasn’t just the looming knowledge she would gain about Zulu it was also that, secretly, Onderstepoort was where she had set her sights for the future.
On finding their way to the double-storey red-brick Equestrian Research Centre, Wendelle was shown the way to the vaccine laboratory while Melodie was left to sit in the reception area. A middle-aged, immaculately groomed woman sat behind the desk.
Melodie pretended to be buried in an agricultural magazine, an article on contagious abortion in cattle, when the receptionist interrupted.
“Are you interested in veterinarian science, dear, is that why you are here?”
Melodie looked up: “Ah, no. Actually I’m looking for a horse.”
“I’m afraid we don’t sell horses here anymore. We used to, but they were all sold off some time back.”
Melodie’s heart raced. “No, no, I had a horse, a black horse named Zulu, but we had to sell him. I think he came here.”
“Can you remember when that would have been, lovey?”
“Ah, yes …” Melodie knew virtually to the day. “It was a little over four years ago, in 1994. October.”
“And you are trying to find this horse, Zulu?”
Melodie nodded.
The older woman rose from her chair, smoothed down her skirt and with a tone of conspiracy, said: “The professor is out for the morning. Let’s sneak into his office and see what we can find.”
Melodie followed the other woman into an adjoining office where she opened a filing drawer and with her long, bright red nails flipped through hanging manila files. “Ye-es, here it is. Zulu …”
Melodie could not restrain herself from leaning on her shoulder and peering at the file.
“Ag shame lovey, this is a special horse then?”
Melodie nodded.
“Ok, let’s see, hmmm …” the receptionist read, licking her index finger and turning pages. “He arrived here on the 7th of October,” she pointed to a line of type with a scarlet fingernail, “and was stabled at Karl Plaas along with the other horses for the snake-bite serum project. I remember that,” she looked up. “But then see here, he was sold.”
“When, who?” blurted Melodie.
The older woman tut-tutted sympathetically.
“Two years ago.” She turned another page.
“Ummmm, yes, here it is. It was Ruff Stevens. Now I remember.” She put one hand to her cheek, looked up and out the glass doors, and sighed: “We used to call him the Cowboy, he was ….” She realised was blushing.
“Umm,” she cleared her throat, “here, what does it say? September, 1997. Sold for R2 000.”
“Not a bad price,” ventured Melodie.
“That was for four horses,” she corrected. “Ag lovey, I’m so sorry. I’d better put this back before the prof returns or I’ll be in hot water.”
Back in the bakkie headed homewards Wendelle was chuffed with her sealed box of vaccine vials. Melodie stared out the window saying nothing.
“Well?” asked the driver when the road west reached open veld.
“Lost again,” replied Melodie, her chin cupped in her hand, arm resting on the door handle, still staring out of the window.
Wendelle drove silently.
“Some horse safari place in the Limpopo Valley.”
The horse safari world was a small one and Wendelle knew immediately who and where it was. She chose to say nothing. Disappointment lay heavy in the cab. The missing soldier had gone missing again, clubfoot and all.